[…] Deceptions as blatant as this are -as far as anyone can tell – rare in the annals of science, but they represent only one end of a broad spectrum of possible scientific cheating. At the other extreme are errors that are at least partly the product of wishful thinking or a failure to guard against bias; in between come numerous gradations of what the Victorian scientist Charles Babbage classified as ”trimming” and ”cooking” (manipulating the data, suppressing inconvenient facts), along with plagiarism, making bogus claims about the probable course of research and the more subtle varieties of Babbage’s third category of misconduct, outright ”forging.”

[…] here are errors, as Mr. Kohn says, that ”are nothing to be ashamed of,” and he begins by considering some examples – in particular, those cases of collective error where a scientist’s initial mistake has been taken up and repeated by other scientists until it assumes the proportions of a mass delusion.

During the 1920’s and 1930’s, for instance, some 500 publications in reputable quarters were devoted to the phenomenon of ”mitogenetic rays” – ultraviolet rays that were erroneously thought to be emitted by plant or animal cells while they were dividing. Mr. Kohn observes that ”mythogenetic rays” might have been a better name; but he also tries to account for what it was that predisposed so many scientists to believe in them, and in subsequent mirages such as ”polywater” (a supposedly anomalous form of water – one eminent authority, J. D. Bernal, referred to it as ”the most important physical chemical discovery of the century”) and ”scotophobin” (a substance said to induce fear of darkness in rats). […]

As I already said, this stuff should be mandatory reading in all science schools.

Until now, there were many strange things already about Venus. Now, there is one more, with possible climate implications. From ESA’s Venus Express: Could Venus be shifting gear?

[…] ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has discovered that our cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured. […] Over its four-year mission, Magellan was able to watch features rotate under the spacecraft, allowing scientists to determine the length of the day on Venus as being equal to 243.0185 Earth days. . However, surface features seen by Venus Express some 16 years later could only be lined up with those observed by Magellan if the length of the Venus day is on average 6.5 minutes longer than Magellan measured. […]

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that 6.5 minutes in 16 years translates in 1.56 watt per hour on each square meter of Venus’ surface, if all the rotational energy is converted into heat (I couldn’t double-check the results though). If this process is cumulative, it will certainly have huge consequences.

[One and a half centuries ago Magalotti wrote] in the Family Letters: “It is certain that seasons’ natural order is worsening. Here in Italy it is common saying and lamentation that the half-seasons have disappeared; and in this confusion, it’s without doubt that the cold is advancing. I have heard my father that in his youth, in Rome, on the morning of Easter Sunday, everybody would change into summer clothes. Nowadays whoever can afford not to sell his shirt, I can tell you he’s very careful not to abandon any winter piece of clothing”. This is what Magalotti wrote in 1683.

The world has grown old and does not remain in its former vigour. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the suns warmth are both diminishing. The metals are nearly exhausted the husbandman is failing in his fields. Springs which once gushed forth liberally now barely give a trickle of water.’

[…] I have found that many authorities now worthy of remembrance were convinced that with the long wasting of the ages, weather and climate undergo a change; and that among them the most learned professional astronomer, Hipparchus, has put it on record that the time will come when the poles will change position, a statement to which Saserna, no mean authority on husbandry, seems to have given credence. For in that book on agriculture which he has left behind he concludes that the position of the heavens had changed from this evidence: that regions which formerly, because of the unremitting severity of winter, could not safeguard any shoot of the vine or the olive planted in them, now that the earlier coldness has abated and the weather is becoming more clement, produce olive harvests and the vintages of Bacchus in the greatest abundance. But whether this theory be true or false, we must leave it to the writings on astronomy […]

Note how little has changed, with Authorities convinced the climate is changing, and the unconvinced agriculture expert…

Actually, it’s much more than a problem of physics. It has vast policy implications.

If models are not useful in a decadal timescale, such as they can predict a strong warming for a period of minimal or even no warning, then what use is there for models? What government (apart from North Korea…) would make it difficult for people to heat up their homes in the next decade with the explanation that is going to be warm in 2070 anyway?

People do not average-out their lives across decades or centuries: each and every one of us have to go through each and every day first.

If I freeze to death today at -10C, I will not enjoy the warmth of July at +30C even if the average is +10C, perfectly compatible with human life. The same can be said of plants and animals. If I plant an olive tree in my London garden, it will die of cold in February even if the yearly average is in theory just enough to make olive trees survive in the open. If a nasty mosquito species migrates from warmer places during an August heatwave, still if that species cannot survive the following winter it will not be around until next migration opportunity during a future heatwave.

A purely statistical, multi-year approach to modelling the climate is in theory useless for policymaking (similar considerations could be made for non-regional projections, but that is too long a story here – read “How Space-Time Digested AGW” if interested). And if we end up with 15 years of incorrect projections without even a volcano for an excuse, then whatever physical explanation there is, policymakers would be much wiser in keeping climate scientists at arm’s length.

In the past decade the atmospheric CO2 levels have increased from 370 ppm to 390 ppm and using those figure the IPCC once estimated that the world should have warmed by at least 0.2 deg C. The fact that the world has not warmed at all means that all the other climatic factors have had a net effect of producing 0.2 deg C of cooling.

But there is more. The counterbalancing climatic factors have not only compensated for the postulated AGW at the end of the decade they have kept the global annual average temperature constant throughout the past 10-15 years when the AGW effect wants to increase it. The key point that makes this constancy fascinating is that for every value of CO2 there is an equilibrium temperature that is higher the greater the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. In other words, the higher CO2 concentration at the end of the decade exerts a stronger climate forcing than at the beginning of the decade.

This makes what has happened in the past decade all the more remarkable. Because the greenhouse effect wants to force the temperature up which in the absence of a cooling influence is what would have happened, the fact that the temperature has remained constant indicates that whatever has been cooling the planet has had to increase in strength at precisely the same rate as the CO2 warming in order to keep the temperature a constant straight line.

This means that for 10-15 years the combined effect of all the Earth’s climate variability factors have increased in such a way as to exactly compensate for the rise in temperature that the increased CO2 would have given us. It is not a question of the earth’s decadal climate cycles adding up to produce a constant cooling effect, they must produce an increasing cooling effect that increases in strength at exactly the same rate as the enhanced greenhouse effect so as to keep the earth’s temperature constant.

Can it really be the case that over the past 15 years the sum total of all the earth’s natural climatic variables such as changes in solar irradiance, volcanoes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the Arctic Oscillation, all of which can change from cooling to warming over decadal timescales, have behaved in such as way as to produce a cooling effect that is the mirror image of the warming postulated by the anthropogenic climate forcings from CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, from the changing water vapour, from tropospheric ozone, and from a clearing aerosol burden?

This can be visualized as following. Imagine there is a quantity ExpT that can be computed beforehand (x(t)=x(t-1)+0.1) (blue in the graph). Consider also the actual measured MeasT values (y(t)=0.5*rand()) (red). Fix x(0)=y(0)=1 and plot their evolution (and divergence).

Now, of course DiffT=y(t)-x(t) (yellow) becomes increasingly larger as x(t) increases whilst y(t) hovers around 0.5. A centered running 5-point average AvgDiff5Cent (green) will mimic ExpT, entering progressively more negative territories. In fact the correlation between AvgDiff5Cent and ExpT is for all intents and purposes, one.

So if ExpT is going up because of CO2 emissions, what kind of magic is intervening to generate the AvgDiff5Cent counterforcing so that the total is zero on a decadal timescale? (And yes, the small small small amount of warming actually reported should obviously be taken as close to undetectable, ie zero).

Even if we had perfect 100% coverage of the whole planet, this question would remain open.

Nobody’s killed as many Communists as Stalin. Nobody’s killed as many Muslims as Osama bin Laden. That’s why whenever somebody wants to save me, maybe I don’t reach for a gun, but I surely prepare for self-defense against the saviors. As I wrote some time ago in “History, a Murderous Farce“:

Napoleon, the Emperor of the French, destroyed the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, thereby establishing the basis for the ascent of the German Empire that was going to humiliate France in 1871.

Prussia and Austria fought hard to establish their leadership over Germany. The result was a militarized Prussian class that killed Germany once in the First World War, and then again with its support for Hitler.

“Of course” Adolf, from Austria of all places, dedicated his life to the nationalist cause, with the result that Germany was annihilate and Prussia airbrushed from history at the end of World War II.

Those are not the only ironies of history. The end result of the Christian Crusades was the undermining of the Byzantine Empire, and the opening up of Eastern Europe to the Ottoman Muslims. Nobody has killed as many Communists as Stalin, or as many Chinese as Chairman Mao, and since Tamerlane perhaps nobody has killed as many Muslims as Osama bin Laden and his loose “organization”.

I am sure there are many more examples of unbelievably unintended consequences. Hadn’t it been for the continuous slaughter, History would be a topic to laugh very hard about.

[…] If you read the private emails of the Climategate scientists, what you discover is that most of them genuinely believe in the climate change peril.

That’s why they lied about the evidence and why they tried to destroy the careers of those scientists who disagreed with them: because they wanted to scare politicians into action before time ran out. This was not science, in other words, but political activism.

A similar ‘end justifies the means’ mentality seems to prevail among all those environmental lobby groups. They don’t exaggerate or misrepresent because they’re bad people. They do it, as a former head of Greenpeace once charmingly put it when accused of having overstated the decline in Arctic sea ice, to ‘emotionalise the issue’; because they want to make the rest of the world care about these issues as much as they do. […]

One of the grimmest ironies of the modern environmental movement is just how much damage it has done to the planet in the name of ‘saving’ it. Green biofuels (crops such as palm oil grown for fuel) have not only led to the destruction of millions of acres of rainforest in Asia, Africa and South America, but are now known to produce four times more CO2 pollution than fossil fuels.

Wind farms, besides blighting views, destroying topsoil and causing massive noise pollution, kill around 400,000 birds a year in the U.S. alone. Environmentalists, in fact, have a disastrous track record when it comes to predictions and policy recommendations […]

Somebody ought to start an environmentalist group to save the environment from the environmentalists.

If everybody reported climate change (skepticism) the way Mr Painter and co-authors did in “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate skepticism“, most statistics about skeptical voices in the media (possibly, elsewhere) would be zero. Indeed, they do hover near zero, apart, that is, from the GWPF, both in the media and in “Poles Apart”. QED. “Poles Apart” surely risks being remembered as just another example of what it was meant to report, the attitude of the media to “skeptical voices”.

This is why “Poles Apart” ends up a frustrating read, in spite of the effort made to put it together. Potentially huge stories are missed by experienced and passionate journalists. How can that be possible? This series of blog posts has illustrated one explanation, the reliance on unreliable sources combined by a self-imposed conviction that the world could be understood from a single point of view. It’s like having to follow to a whole season of football from the ManU TV channel, when Chelsea FC wins the Premiership: you know the commentators are professionals and speak with knowledge and expertise, yet you also know there is a lot of the actual story they are going to miss.

There is simply no way certain ideas will be uttered, true and real as they might be. “We wuz robbed” will always take precedence over “they were robbed”: analogously “skeptics are funded by right-wingers and Big Oil” will be taken as granted whilst “let’s look at the arguments instead of labelling people” is perhaps briefly pondered, only to be quickly hidden away. In both cases, extremely little space will be provided to the opponents’ remarks. True Believers won’t find anything controversial for their eyes to read, in “Poles Apart”.

This is what happens when only one channel is listened to: mental closure, oversimplification, time wasted in caricaturing the ‘enemy’, ultimately ‘reductio ad certamen’, i.e. the transformation of science (and journalism) into team sports.

“Journalists and other key communicators often lack the knowledge base, skills and online and offline resources to cut thought the confusion and accurately report on the complex science of climate change and this can be especially true in developing countries.”

“Poles Apart” is close to the solution and yet stubbornly and half-blindly refuses to consider it. Still, the cage’s locks can be broken. Dear Mr Painter! Start from Geoffrey Lean’s words!

(p115) All but the extremists on either side agree that the planet is warming that humanity is at least partly responsible – and that we don’t know how big its contribution is, or what the effects will be

Expand the report. Include skeptics, their propositions, their first-hand quotes, especially what argument they make for their particular brand of skepticism. Include the online activity, and analyse the full spectrum of ideas in much detail. Don’t be afraid to admit there is scientific and policy variety among the non-skeptic, and by all means never ever conflate people away, to debate regions resembling the areas marked “Hic Sunt Leones” in ancient maps, literally “Here there are lions” with the meaning of “This is the deadly dangerous unknown region to avoid at all cost”.

Mr Painter, and anybody else who says they care about AGW: it’s time you realise the future is in opening up the debate. At the risk of sounding like an unreformed Libertarian: let the fact, and the truth free. They’re struggling within.

If you’ve read so far you’re unlikely to be Mr Painter. Or a ‘warmist’. Or a ‘believer’ in (catastrophic) climate change. By the way, according to “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate skepticism” I am a ‘skeptic’ (together with 99% of humanity, as we have seen). I qualify under two categories:

“global temperatures are warming but a) the anthropogenic contribution (burning fossil fuels) to global warming or climate change is over-stated […] compared to other factors like natural variations or sun spots”

and

“it is not known with enough certainty what the impacts will be” and “urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is not necessary”.

Rather, I think that urgent action on adaptation to current climate conditions is sorely needed. And no, I don’t think there is any conspiracy at work on the part of evil warmists. Never mind: as a skeptic, according to many people I shouldn’t be allowed to express my opinions. The mere existence of this very series of blog posts puts me on par with mass murderers and (according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, apparently) apartheid supporters. Is that too strong a concept? “No Pressure” videos of exploding children aside, I am the victim of an ongoing hate/cyber-bullying campaign by an Italian journalist writing for a national newspaper. Go figure.

James Painter […] said: ‘There are politicians in the UK and the US who espouse some variation of climate skepticism. Both countries also have organisations for ‘climate change skeptics’ that provide a skeptical voice for the media, particularly in those media outlets that are more receptive to this message. This is why we see more skeptical coverage in the Anglo-Saxon countries than we do in the other countries in the study where one or more of those factors appear to be absent.’

Poles Apart doesn’t nail the issue completely, but its broad conclusion may be familiar to many: “The weight of this study would suggest that, out of this wide range of factors, the presence of politicians espousing some variation of climate skepticism, the existence of organised interests that feed skeptical coverage, and partisan media receptive to this message, all play a particularly significant role in explaining the greater prevalence of skeptical voices in the print media of the USA and the UK.”

Espousing politicians, organised interests ‘feeding’ the skeptics, partisan media, USA and UK mostly. What would that mean, actually? As we have seen much is made by Mr Painter of Pat Michaels’ connections to the oil industry. Words aren’t spared to describe what might be funding some forms of climate skepticism. Then there is the mention of Lord Lawson and Lord Monckton.

Is it too much of a stretch then to interpret “Poles Apart” as trying to prove that the vast majority of climate change skepticism is a “crazy British toffs and American Republicans on the pay of Big Oil” thing?

That wouldn’t be journalism. Or would it? It depends.

What is journalism, at a time when “media ethics” is something broadcast live on a daily basis for the Leveson Inquiry “into the culture, practice and ethics of the press”? Is it about informing the public, and/or educating it? Is it about entertainment, eliciting readers to read by constantly diverting their attention? Or is journalism a form of activism, a way to push for the truth, perhaps a truth? This is what “Poles Apart”’s journalism-from-the-cage mostly risks looking like. And yet it wouldn’t have been too far to break the cage down. Mr Painter could have made up his mind about who is a skeptic and who isn’t, therefore abhorring any conflation. Take the point about the necessity of “urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW”.

That is a point of policy, not just of science. What is the meaning of “substantial”? How many years have to pass before something is not “urgent”? And who would ever believe that all non-skeptics agree on exactly what action is needed? Or even if adaptation, getting ready to survive/resist climate events, should be more or less important than mitigation, cutting greenhouse gas emissions in order to lower the frequency of occurrence and/or strength of those climate events? Ms Nadin made it clear, during the launch event for “Poles Apart”, that there is a Chinese debate on adaptation. Are the people involved therein really to be categorised as skeptics?

As Mr Revkin said during the event, policy debates are legitimate. To remotely suggest otherwise, marking for example the GWPF as some kind of unquotable organisation on its way to ruin the planet because branded by the sin of libertarianism, is conspiratorial, therefore seldom serious. In fact, it is not difficult to find an alternative, non-conspiratorial, history-grounded explanation of the report’s results than “espousing politicians, organised interests ‘feeding’ the skeptics, and partisan media”. Consider the following:

For the UK and USA: at the launch event, debate chairman John Lloyd suggested at some point, that in the UK (and USA) there is a societal penchant for debate. Unfortunately, there is also the recently-established press tradition so nicely described by Nick Davies in “Flat Earth News”, i.e. the massive regurgitation of “wire copy and/or PR material”.

In Brazil: it might all be down to reporters too enamoured of scientific papers to question anything in them, and to explicit or implicit lobbying by those who would benefit from climate change mitigation policies:

(p66) “US media academic Myanna Lahsen who lives in Brazil says that ‘climate skepticism is hardly existent in the Brazilian media […]’. Another factor is that much of the coverage of science in the Brazilian media is driven by scientific papers appearing in Brazilian and international journals, where there is little space afforded to skeptical arguments”

(p69) “…sectors [of Brazil’s business elite] stand to gain from the continued pursuit of ambitious plans to further biofuel production, where Brazil is second only to the USA in volume of output”

Regarding China: Ms Nadin told the event’s audience something along the lines of the Chinese government having a strong position about AGW, a topic that is (therefore?) not politically contentious. But this may results in self-censorship and reporting following the party line, as per two examples from the report:

(p71) “skeptical discourses in China make a clear distinction between certain scientific findings, which they may question, and domestic policy statements, which they would not”

(p72) “Academic and other studies suggest that the volume of coverage of climate change increased substantially after the 2007 IPCC reports, often with official encouragement”

Regarding France: following Mr Sciama, one might be able to explain fully and in purely non-scientific terms the local embracing of mainstream climate change science, and the almost complete absence of skeptical voices from the media. From the report:

(p79) “France has a rationalist, engineer culture and people who have gone to engineer schools often end up in politics or influential positions. This entire social class of powerful engineer has links with the nuclear lobby. I would also say there is a tradition of respecting the science and not challenging the experts which is quite strong in France. This is probably why climate change was accepted very early”

At the event, Mr Sciama suggested the French revolution of 1789 as an additional factor, replacing aristocracy with “meritocracy” (perhaps a better word would be “technocracy”).

In India: according to “Poles Apart”, the media spectrum is actively occupied by organised believers in catastrophic AGW, literally pushing skeptics out of the way:

(p81) There have been two dominant narratives in the Indian media coverage of climate change…the dominance […] leaves scant room for climate skepticism

(p81) Part of the reason why [skeptical Indian] voices have not been heard much is the high profile of prominent individuals like Dr Pachauri and non-governmental organisations (such as the Center for Science and Environment, Greenpeace India, WWF India, or the Energy Research Institute). They have been vocal about the risks and impacts of man-made climate change and seem to have wielded a significant influence on climate reporting. They often enjoy close relationships with Indian environment reporters.

(p83) the voice of the climate change ‘believers’ is so strong that [Nitin Sethi, Special Correspondent for the Times of India] is wary of civil society and the 500 local and internationally affiliated NGOs he says there are in India which are pushing the government to do more on climate change.

In summary: in the UK/USA, prevalence of believers over skeptics might as well mean warmists are monopolising the press releases manipulating the media into shutting off all skeptics, whose voices are still heard (however faintly) mainly because of a long-standing freedom to report ‘both sides’.

In Brazil, nobody questions mainstream science. In China, skeptics will appear in newspapers as soon as the Communist Party will say they ought to appear. In France, the field is wholly occupied by technocrats, ie mindless (and anti-historical) followers of the latest mainstream science (it’s not by chance that Jules Romain, a French, wrote in 1923 the play “Dr Knock or The Triumph of Medicine”, where a whole village falls under the spell of a new local doctor, convincing them that to feel well is only the ignorant sensation of a sick person).

In India, the noise from climate change activists make skeptical idea inaudible. Is it possible to connect those dots now? Anybody else seeing a pattern, (relative) freedom to report on skepticism on one side, but forceful pushing on the journalists to avoid skeptics on the other? Could it be that Mr Painter and his fellow researchers have been measuring not the power of lobbies or partisan media, but (in the tiny amounts of skeptical voices allowed in print) flickering residual freedom of thought and speech, recalcitrance against being led by the nose by the latest bunch of experts, and willingness on the part of journalists to investigate rather than supinely doing as told?

If that were shown true, it would be truly ironic for the RISJ; they might have reported with “Poles Apart” a great story about journalism without even noticing. And it wouldn’t be the only story missed by Mr Painter and co-authors. Let’s go back to that one-of-two-skeptical-quote, by Dr Peiser of the GWPF:

(p4) “The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has been particularly successful in getting its views reported across most of the 10 UK newspapers. The two most quoted skeptics by far in the [Nov 2009-Feb 2010 Copenhagen/Climategate] period were Lord Lawson and Benny Peiser (more than 80 times between them) both from the GWPF”

Seems the GWPF has achieved the considerable success of getting at least a tiny part of its views reported by “Poles Apart” too! And that’s not all: the GWPF was founded a few months before the Copenhagen/Climategate period, so the fact that its most prominent representatives were “the two most quoted skeptic” by year’s end is a sign of remarkably speedy success. Alas (but not surprisingly), Mr Painter and co-authors seem to have missed that. Commenting on “Poles Apart”, Richard Black didn’t:

“Among other things, it shows the success that the the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has had in inserting itself into national discourse since its establishment in 2009 – a success noted this week by the conservativehome blog, which describes it as ‘one of the most important think-tanks in Britain today’”

Ironically, the GWPF found himself praised at the “Poles Apart” launch event, temporarily stealing the show thanks to two non-skeptic.

Mr Revkin agreed with Dr Peiser (who was in the attendance) about the importance of open and frank policy discussions, unencumbered by accusations of denial. According to Mr Revkin, a large problem in the US debate has been leftist (“progressive”?) politicians doing a disservice to a complex situation. He thinks that they have forced anthropogenic global warming into a “single sentence” containing both the issue (climate change) and the solution (emission reduction), thereby attempting to shut off everybody disagreeing on policy just like everybody disagreeing on science. That is of course absurd, non-democratic and unsustainable. As we have seen, even “Poles Apart” suffers a lot from such a conflation.

“with no clue on what they are forced to write about in the hope of getting the least likely reader to still read their articles; with communications strictly coming only from a single channel; unable to report good news, ignorant of science and pretending to be commenting football: well, climate change reporters live in a cage of their own making and the real miracle is when any one of them does report anything remotely non-biased on climate change”

Note that Mr Painter did mention, during his presentation at the launch event, that people are “confused about skepticism” because few recognise the range of different opinions among skeptics. But why! It takes only a few minutes of participation, even just of reading of popular skeptical sites such as Wattsupwiththat, Climate Audit, Real Science, Bishop Hill, The Reference Frame to understand “the full spectrum of climate skepticism”. The “confusion” can only arise from a forcibly-myopic view, merging the extreme diversity of opinions only by keeping oneself away from skeptics, and considering them from afar as some kind of amorphous evil group of abnormal people, monsters unable to express themselves properly, continuously trying to spread disinformation with the aim of ruining the planet.

Even Mr Painter appears to have woken up to the absurdity of such a concept only after Copenhagen (or Climategate). And yet the cage pervades “Poles Apart”. At times, it pushes the report to the hedge of ridicule, reminding of Stalinist pamphlets claiming Trotskyites were not Communist enough (or Catholic documents proclaiming Protestants as non-believers). Look at how Bjorn Lomborg gets included as an example of “climate skeptic” (p23), despite having written in his own FAQ:

“Q: Does Lomborg deny man-made global warming exists?
A: No. In Cool It he writes: “global warming is real and man-made. It will have a serious impact on humans and the environment toward the end of this century” (p8).”

“Q: Does he believe we should do anything about global warming?
A: Yes. […] Lomborg also supports a CO 2 tax comparable with the central or high estimates of CO2 damages. That means an estimate in the range of $2-14 per ton of CO2 […] ”

What skeptic would include Lomborg among skeptics? It’s a concept that stretches the edges of reason. In the “Poles Apart” world where Bjorn-“global warming is real and man-made”-Lomborg gets branded as one of the bad guys and an exemplary one at that, one really has to wonder (a) who else would become a skeptic and (b) who’d ever be left out.

(p9) “Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain”.

Another potential “Poles Apart skeptic”? Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts (!) at the Met Office, seen on the web providing arguments for those unconvinced that “urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is not necessary”:

Even Geoffrey Lean’s words at the end of the report fall under “anthropogenic global warming is happening but a) it is not known with enough certainty what the impacts will be”:

(p115) All but the extremists on either side agree that the planet is warming that humanity is at least partly responsible – and that we don’t know how big its contribution is, or what the effects will be

So “Poles Apart” ends, with its own final quote potentially “skeptical”. Think that’s absurd enough? Think again. If we try to reconstruct who’s not a skeptic, by reversing the “Poles Apart” definition, we find only True Believers. A “climate change non-skeptic” is anybody convinced that:

Global temperatures are warming, and

The anthropogenic contribution (burning fossil fuels) to global warming or climate change is not over-stated, compared to other factors like natural variations or sun spots, and

It is known with enough certainty what the main causes are, and

It is known with enough certainty what the impacts will be, as climate models are adequate and no other doubt is relevant enough, and

Urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is necessary

Scientifically, it’s an untenable position: when there is no doubt, there is no science. It could make sense as a political stance, for an “extremist” party that is (as per Lean’s meaning of the word – see quote above). In any case, it is quite dangerous to mix the concept of ‘skepticism’ in policy and political matters. Shouldn’t people be free to disagree on one or more points without being labelled as ‘monsters’? Surely that’s something everybody agrees on (Chinese officials aside).

There is more unintended hilarity in the explanation given about the absence of climate change skeptics in the Brazilian media:

(p66) Brazilian journalists interviewed for this study also emphasised the strong journalistic culture of science and environment reporting which carried considerable weight within newspapers and other media outlets and strongly influenced their editorial line on climate skepticism

Of course they would, wouldn’t they? Classical scholars know the argument, it’s like Cicero writing “De domo sua”, about his own house. Nobody will speak badly about themselves. Quite the opposite: who will ever reply in an interview, “I’m sorry but we’re clueless about the science and just keep printing stuff from press releases”? Given also the fact that a few lines of text above, the Brazilian press is described as uninterested in global warming until five years ago:

(p65) There is some evidence for thinking that coverage of global warming and climate change in the Brazilian print media began to take off in the latter half of 2006

So much for “strong journalistic culture of science and environment reporting”. Another clear example of how distorted is Mr Painter’s view from within the cage, is the Appendix I of “Poles Apart”, dedicated to Climategate. All doubts on the six affair-related inquiries get assigned to skeptics, as if the author had given up on any possibility of serious investigation, an ironic situation for any journalist. Little wonder then if there are some inaccuracies.True, “Poles Apart” mentions the infamous words about “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” and includes some kind of attempt at explaining what the fuss was all about:

(p117) the UEA scientists explained that the ‘decline’ referred to a drop in temperatures inferred from the proxy analysis of tree rings, and that the ‘trick’ meant a graphic device to merge different sets of data from tree rings and thermometer readings

Note however the reader is told nothing about what the hiding was (just a “graphic device”? No: the outright removal of inconvenient data values, and the smoothing of the join between two different data sets). Also there is no hint about the actual underlying issue (the “divergence problem”), or its importance, both described by Andrew Montford in “The Climategate Inquiries”, a report for the GWPF published in 2010:

(p16-17) “The issue revolved around a tree ring series that had been used to reconstruct temperatures of the past […]. This series diverged dramatically from instrumental temperatures in the last half of the twentieth century, experiencing a sharp decline during a period when instrumental temperatures were rising. Showing this divergence would have raised a major question mark over the reliability of tree ring temperature reconstructions since, if there is a divergence between tree rings and instrumental records in modern times, it cannot be said with any certainty that such divergences did not also occur in the past, rendering the temperature reconstruction of questionable utility”

“Poles Apart” readers will get almost nothing of that. Furthermore, look at how Mr Painter describes Lord Oxburgh’s “Science Assessment Panel”, convened in the wake of Climategate:

(p117) “[the] independent [committee] commissioned by the UEA that focused on the science being done at CRU”

“The Panel was not concerned with the question of whether the conclusions of the published research were correct. Rather it was asked to come to a view on the integrity of the Unit’s research and whether as far as could be determined the conclusions represented an honest and scientifically justified interpretation of the data”

“[…] as I [Lord Oxburgh] have pointed out to you previously the science was not the subject of our study”

And a lot could be said about the alleged “independence” of Lord Oxburgh’s “independent” panel (see “The Climategate Inquiries”, pp29-38).

These unfortunate cases of mistaken, partial and/or incomplete reporting will continue in Mr Painter’s and the RISJ output on climate change as long as texts written by skeptics will be considered anathema even as reading material, let alone source for quotes or information. “Poles Apart” is saturated of that attitude, and that makes the attentive reader wary of some of the material mentioned in it too. For example, a quote is taken from Naomi Oreskes and her book with Erik Conway “The Merchant of Doubt – How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”:

(p13) “[in the USA, the] divergence between the state of the science and how it was presented in the major media helped make it easy for our governament to do nothing about global warming”

“[Oreskes and Conway] miss a crucial point: the ingrained assumption that scientific evidence is the only authority that can justify policy action — scientism — is what renders both policy and its supporting science vulnerable to the dogmatic amplification of doubt.”

More: a rather inordinate outburst by Robin McKie of the Observer is given pride of place:

(p14) “Only a handful of truly reputable scientists are skeptical about the link between global warming and our industrial activities. More to the point, that minority is given a vastly disproportionate amount of publicity. Note the same old faces – the Lawsons and Moncktons – who are trotted out to speak on Newsnight or Channel 4 News whenever climate change is debated.”

That quote is from a public exchange between McKie and Benny Peiser, Director of the GWPF, in The Observer in the wake of Climategate and United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. “Poles Apart” does contain some of the text written on the occasion by Peiser too. This might be one of two or three direct quotes of words written by somebody considered a skeptic, in the whole report (note however, it contains nothing about climate change skepticism):

There are two problems with that. First of all, it is rather unfortunate that the one quote by a UK-based “skeptic”, is singularly buried in the text, rather than highlighted as every other quote as a block, with indented left and right margins. Only the most careful readers will not miss it.

More importantly, Peiser was talking about “inflated climate alarm” but McKie tried to shift the discussion to a “link between global warming and our industrial activity” – the existence of which does not imply the necessity to raise climate change alarms. Again in this case, “Poles Apart” seems to have conflated together all criticisms of mainstream climate change thinking into a single group.

After all: if few have so far defined what they mean by “climate change skepticism” (as noted by Andy Revkin); and few have recognised that there are several kinds of it (as noted by “Poles Apart” author James Painter); therefore, much of the existing literature on climate change skepticism and the media (or anything else) should be taken with the classical grain of salt.

Rather differently than Isaac Newton, Dr Painter might have found himself not on the shoulder of giants, but under the boots of minions. And that would explain the acceptance of the sloppy shorthand form, “climate skepticism” (rather than “climate CHANGE skepticism”). Unless that is, there is something else at work.

It is glaring, because the ultimate subject of the study doesn’t make almost any first-hand appearance, in a sea of ultimately unreliable hearsays. “Poles Apart” at times reads like a LGBT study written without any LGBT author or interviewee: so much for “agnosticism”.

It is paradoxical, because it further removes academic value from the report. Had skeptics been involved, truly “Poles Apart” would have been groundbreaking: alongside a definition of skepticism and a recognition of the diversity among skeptics, it would have included even a treatment of skeptics as normal human beings deserving attention, instead of monsters (note that there is a quote from Benny Peiser of the GWPF at page 14 – but blink and you’ll miss it; more on that later).

And what it is telling? The attempt of writing about skepticism without listening to skeptics shows the conditions under which the report has been written. We have already seen how Mr Painter’s warmist stance managed to have a large negative impact on his insightful observation that there are several kinds of skepticism. There are two further and complementary aspects to that: the excessive (almost, tragic) trust put in dubious (and always warmist) sources, and the determined effort to lock oneself in a warmist cage in order to keep skeptics away.

Having to rush through his opening presentation at the launch event of “Poles Apart” in order to make time for Mr Revkin, who had to leave relatively early, Mr Painter still made sure the audience would know the report had been built upon a large number of academic works in the field of climate change and the media. This is of course very important to provide “Poles Apart” with a “firmer footing” than a purely anecdotal approach. However, it also means that very same footing is weakened by the uncritical acceptance of dubious sources.

Of course it has been known for a while that Prof Jones’ contribution to the BBC impartiality and accuracy was anything but. The very review document’s PDF had to be modified a few days after publication to sport the following text at page 2:

“On 8 August 2011 the Trust published an updated version of Professor Steve Jones’ independent review of the accuracy and impartiality of the BBC’s science coverage due to an ambiguity in the section on climate change. This reference was in the section on pages 71-72, immediately before Professor Jones discussed statements about climate change contained in two BBC programmes. The Trust and Professor Jones now recognise that the passage as originally published could be interpreted as attributing statements made in those two programmes to Lord Lawson or to Lord Monckton. Neither programme specifically featured Lord Lawson or Lord Monckton and it was not Professor Jones’ intention to suggest that this was the case. Professor Jones has apologised for the lack of clarity in this section of his assessment, which has now been amended.”

To this day, it is not know to whom to attribute those “statements”. Perhaps less known is the fact that Professor Jones’ inaccuracies don’t stop with the good Lords. From page 72 of the “Independent Assessment”:

“A submission made to this Review by Andrew Montford and Tony Newbery (both active in the anti‐global‐warming movement, and the former the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science) devotes much of its content to criticising not the data on temperatures but the membership of a BBC seminar on the topic in 2006, and to a lengthy discussion as to whether its Environment Analyst was carrying out BBC duties or acting as a freelance during an environment programme at Cambridge University. The factual argument, even for activists, appears to be largely over but parts of the BBC are taking a long time to notice.”

“Readers may remember that Tony Newbery (of Harmless Sky) and I made a submission to the review. In it we demonstrated that the BBC Trust had misled the public over a seminar discussing climate change coverage back in 2006.”

“can anyone explain to me why Andrew and I might choose to write about the global temperature record to a geneticist who is conducting a review of journalism for a broadcaster? Apparently Professor Jones thinks that is what we should have done. And he also seems to think that because we didn’t do this, we must think that the debate about the science of climate change is over. That is just plain silly.

In fact we wrote to Professor Jones providing evidence, and I do mean evidence, that the BBC’s news gathering operation had become far too close to environmental activism and environmental activists to be able to report climate change impartially or accurately (here). That criticism is clearly material to his report, and his failure to address the issues we raised says far more about the rigour with which he has conducted his review than it does about our views on the science of climate change, which are in any case irrelevant to his review.”

Did Professor Jones actually read, let alone strove to understand Montford and Newbery’s submission? That doesn’t look likely. By the way, they were not granted a correction. The fact that they are not Lords of the Land has obviously nothing to do with that.

Speaking immediately after Professor Jones at the “Poles Apart” launch event, I myself did wonder loudly if we were inhabiting the same universe. Has the BBC ever invited anybody to discuss 2+2=5? Of course not. What one finds on the airwaves and in the website is a Corporation encouraging a WWF activist to campaign on live radio during a recent broadcasting of Radio4’s flagship Today programme; and being obsessed with global warming to the point of inserting tips on how to organise a climate change conference in his Italian language course of all places (see my blog post: “Yes, John: Steve Jones Is Wrong And The BBC Totally Unbalanced On Climate Change”, Nov 11).

Perhaps Professor Jones does consider any question improper, even the pretend ones asked at the Today programme. Things have been progressing though: as if it were at all possible, the situation is now getting even worse for the BBC “impartiality”, “accuracy” and Professor Jones’ “2+2=5” argument, with the news that some TV and radio programmes might have been surreptitiously sponsored by activist organisations and companies with vested interests in pushing forward a “warmist” agenda on climate change. See here.

“Part of the news process means being wrong some of the time. Joe Romm is never wrong.”

Quoting Romm about climate change should be avoided if the topic is not caricature. It is equivalent to quoting a six-day creationist about the Book of Genesis, and just as informative. Likewise, “Poles Apart” refers an inordinate amount of times to a book where an environmental scientist (Dr Haydn Washington) and a cartoonist/blogger (John Cook) insanely describe skepticism as a sociopathological trait (“Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand”). In fact the problem is not so much citing from this or that source, but the amount of trust put in them. Skepticism, obviously, is very much needed also when gathering for information. The Joe Romms of the world may even be interesting, insightful, provocative, and worthy of being read and quoted at will. But anybody taking their words as “right” will find themselves in danger of being led astray.

This applies to the very same New York Times where Mr Revkin still takes care of the DotEarth blog. “Poles Apart” quotes from Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Journalism Review:

(p90) “It’s not simple ideology: it’s more that the [New York] Times is not blinded by ideology”

Attentive readers might disagree. At the beginning of March 2010, an article by John M Broder appeared in the front page of the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times. The article was titled “Feeling the heat from critics, climate scientists battle back” and it was a first attempt by the NYT to do some analysis on Climategate (an ‘affair’ that was four months old at the time already).

Uniquely in the history of the IHT (whose articles usually follow the US edition, appearing on paper a day after they’ve been written and published on the website), Broder’s article was nowhere to be seen at nytimes.com until the early AM GMT hours of March 3. As I reported on my blog the following day:

“Tellingly, the structure has been heavily changed, and the interviewees as well. I have had a series of e-mail exchanges with Mr Broder today and won’t report any of them. The impression remains that some Editor at the NYT panicked after reading the IHT version, and got Mr Broder or some sub-editor to rewrite it almost from scratch to eliminate some inconvenient names and acquire warmist respectability by giving the concluding remarks to Gavin Schmidt. All in all, it has been an episode wholly consistent with an atmosphere of climate bullying at the NYT.”

An important point to make is that neither version of Mr Broder’s article looked remotely “skeptical” on climate change, so this is not an episode of censorship. Rather, it is further evidence of the New York Times being “blinded by ideology” on climate-related pieces, so that the original quote by Judith Curry on Broder’s piece for example had to be excised and the article purified further (in the “warmist” direction, of course). To see how debasing this has become for the climate sections of the newspaper, have a look at Souren Melikian’s wonderful, questioning, informative, challenging, no-holds-barred IHT articles on the art market.

Sadly, self-blinding by ideology is seldom the result of a conscious process. Mr Painter may have done just as much in “Poles Apart”. In Appendix 3 we are told:

(p123) “the search engines came up with significant numbers of articles where the key word ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ were mentioned briefly at the start but where not the main focus [or] the article was not about either of these topics. […] We decided to keep these in the sample ”

and

(p123) “an opinion piece could be skeptical in tone about global warming/climate change, or the need to take measures to combat it, but include no mention or quoting of skeptical voices. These were generally excluded”

How strange…non-skeptics get included no matter who’s mentioned, skeptics get excluded unless somebody else is mentioned. As if there truly were too many skeptical voices to choose from. One has to wonder why no author noticed the end result, a zero count for “skeptical editorials” in all countries and newspapers (see table 4.1, lines 20/21 at page 56).

This is equivalent to building a cage for oneself, safe inside away from the words of those nasty, evil, monstrous skeptics.

“[“Poles Apart”] can’t be considered a truly comprehensive global snapshot in that it’s looked at only six countries, albeit important ones…this is a toe-dip into media coverage rather than a comprehensive survey.”

“Toe-dip”? Indeed, “Poles Apart” is not academic, and it doesn’t pretend to be. But this also means it is more akin to a collection of impressions and anecdotes informed by academic studies and datasets, than to a scientific work. And this is a problem: as everybody who is active in the climate change discourse surely and painfully knows, there cannot be much understanding of the real world without science. A point sadly lost on Leo Hickman of the Guardian, again commenting on “Poles Apart”:

“…a hunch I have long believed to carry some substance: climate skepticism is a predominantly Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. Or, rather, it is a phenomenon that tends to gets amplified to a much greater extent in the various English-language media outlets around the world – particularly, in the US, UK and Australia – than it does in other languages or countries. Until now, there has been very little beyond the anecdotal to support this theory. But the proposition is now on a firmer footing thanks to a new report…”

Hickman is wrong on multiple fronts, and “Poles Apart” will leave him confused, worse, incorrectly sure about the still-unknowable.

If one wanted to really look into English-language media, there’s much more than climate skepticism that tends to get amplified. Take the Daily Mail, reported in “Poles Apart” as providing space to skeptics but very much on the warmist side until the end of 2009 at least: to the point of publishing a fantasy-based article about drowning polar bears, loosely based on some actual sightings (of non-drowning polar bears). The article was reprised and the fantasy amplified further (!!!) in the Italian media at the time, as documented at my Sep 3, 2008 blog post “Polar Bears: Has the Daily Mail Just Pulled a Deceiving Article?”.

Scientifically speaking, the anecdotal nature of “Poles Apart” is just one of the potential ‘confounding factors’, that is, the missing or not sufficiently explored details that might have misled Mr Painter and colleagues in their analysis. In fact, the UK overreaction to past climate change scares should have been investigated in “Poles Apart”, but wasn’t, leaving a gaping hole, even if Brazilian journalist Claudio Angelo is quoted as saying:

(p67) [Brazilian daily newspaper] Folha underreported ‘Climategate’, partly to resist the media frenzy created in the UK around the affair, and partly because Brazil has never hyped climate change the way the British press did, with a lot of doom-and-gloom stories.

Other ‘confounding factors':

Are ‘skeptics’ truly and fully represented by the four categories used in “Poles Apart”?

What exactly is represented in the media included in the research? Mr Revkin told the launch event audience that he left journalism to work on “fostering innovation”. Minutes later, Yves Sciama said “I’m a science reporter” after an audience member had reminded everybody that climate change should better be described as an issue not of science, rather about the political economy of energy generation, distribution and consumption.

How many of the articles in the analysis were based on ‘churnalism’, the almost wholesale dressing up of news agency and press release copy as original articles, a problem very much present across the world and definitely in the UK media, and a problem mentioned in passing in “Poles Apart”?

In the Anglo-Saxon vs. Rest-of-the-World differences about Climategate, what was the contribution of the fact that 100% of the Climategate material was in English and most of it included British and American scientists?

Is there any other running difference between the media in the UK and USA compared to the other nations involved in the analysis, for example linked to ownership structure?

Was the reported change in coverage of climate change skepticism accompanied by changes in public opinion? If yes, which change led, and which one followed? And how does the situation about climate change compare to other scientific and/or political topics?

Is there any link between prevalence of skeptical voices and the realisation that certain parts of the world are expected to have to pay for mitigation and adaptation, and others to receive funding instead?

These are all questions to answers before reaching an academic level, before having scientific conclusions, i.e. before being able to draw conclusions at all.

There is one aspect we can investigate further. Chapter 2 of “Poles Apart”, “The Nature of Climate skepticism” is 18 pages long and still the first skeptic mentioned in there is after four-and-a-half pages (Pat Michaels). Among the first things we learn, his “about 40 per cent” funding from “oil industry sources”. No other quotes by Michaels are provided, and there is no description of what he is skeptical about. A little more can be had with Steve McIntyre, whose voluminous blog Climate Audit is mentioned but not quoted (a description of McIntyre’s “skepticism” is taken from “one US magazine”). This means statements like the one below (from Climate Audit’s Jan 5, 2006 entry) are literally invisible to the “Poles Apart” authors:

“As I often repeat, I [Steve McIntyre] am not a “contrarian”. If I were a politician and forced to make a decision on climate policy in the next 10 minutes, I would be guided by the IPCC and the various learned societies that I so often criticize.”

Lord Monckton? Readers of “Poles Apart” learn of his “anti-communist ideology” before everything else. No quote by him either. Finally, Bjorn Lomborg. Guess what? No quote by the Danish scientist. The chapter about skepticism chugs along with a single direct quote by a non-warmist, “Joe Bast, the head of climate skeptic Heartland Institute” but his printed words (to Nature magazine) are not about skeptical propositions:

(p25) “The left has no reason to look under the hood of global warming […] The right does, and that’s what happened”

No much luck in the rest of the chapter with Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Ian Plimer, etc etc. We have already seen that the Bibliography points to a single skeptical work, in French. What was then the effect on the “Poles Apart” analysis of having it done without any skeptic either among the authors or interviewees?

A major problem in the “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate skepticism” report is an apparent, underlying inconsistency driven by the unshaken belief that there is something wrong in being a climate change skeptic of any sort. The authors’ relentlessly “warmist” opinions result in the undermining of what could have been a great attempt at clarifying what climate change skepticism actually is.

This all starts with quite a strong claim, early on in the report:

(p14) “This study has been prompted by these important [climate change] debates but it is largely agnostic about them. It is not its purpose to criticise climate skeptics.”

Is that so? Mr Painter is not new to climate-related work and his past activity reveals a clear stance on the science, policy and politics of climate change. Exactly a year ago Mr Painter published for the RISJ another report, aptly and self-consciously titled “Summoned by Science: Reporting Climate Change at Copenhagen and Beyond” with a main web page describing him:

“Mr Painter is the head of the Journalism Fellowship Programme at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. He worked for several years at the BBC World Service in various capacities including Americas Executive editor, head of the Spanish American Service and head of the BBC Miami office. He has written extensively on climate change, the media and Latin America for several organisations and publications, including the BBC, the UNDP, Oxfam and Oxford Analytica. He is the author of several books on Latin America, and of the RISJ challenge, Counter-Hegemonic News: A case study of Al-Jazeera English and Telesur.”

BBC, UNDP, Oxfam, Oxford Analytica, and now the British Council, hardly hotbeds of skepticism, In fact the “Summoned by Science” report contains a revealing phraseology such as:

(p9) “A more science-based series of reports […] released in the months running up to Copenhagen suggested […] the need for an ambitious and binding deal was made all the more urgent by the latest science”

(p10) “it was not just the heads of state, but journalists too who had been summoned to Copenhagen by the urgency of the climate science”

(p88) “The phenomenon of extreme climatic events around the world in 2010 suggests that reporting people’s experience of the weather will become more pressing an issue. Separate data from the NOAA and NASA published in July 2010 found that the first half of the year was the warmest on record globally. Seventeen countries – including Pakistan which registered a record temperature of 53.5C – have experienced record-breaking high temperatures. As Peter Stott of the UK Met Office explained, ‘the evidence is so clear the chance there’s something we haven’t thought of [that could be warming the climate the other than GHGs] seems to be getting smaller and smaller’.”

(p1) “in the last 18 months I have been lucky enough to travel to parts of the world on the front line of the impact of global warming. These have included Indonesia, Greenland, Vietnam where sea level rises threaten catastrophic economic effects, and Bolivia and Peru where the melting glaciers raise very serious concerns over future freshwater supplies in the dry season”

(p3) “One respected research group is now predicting ice-free summers by 2013”

(p4) “We know that after 10,000 years of relatively stable temperatures, global warming has caused the Amazon region to increase in temperature by about a quarter of a degree C per decade since 1975”

Mr Painter’s attitude in matters of climate change doesn’t remotely reminds of skepticism and is clear throughout the “Poles Apart” report. For example the Climategate “affair” is referred at page 14 to Fred Pearce’s “The Climate Files” and an “unpublished manuscript” by a Myanna Lahsen, with no mention of very-much-published books, Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion – Climategate and the Corruption of Science” or of (non-skeptic) Steven Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller’s “Climategate: The CRUtape Letters”. The Bibliography refers also to Greenpeace but includes only a single “skeptic” piece, in French by Claude Allègre. And the whole report seemingly assumes the curious opinion that everything ‘skeptic’ is necessarily lacking legitimacy, as implied in Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard’s quote from page 39, where climate (change) skepticism becomes the opposite of ‘straight reporting’ of science:

(p39) “Overall I would say that coverage of climate skepticism is a relatively minor problem. […] Almost all the US newspapers now report the science straight; they just don’t cover it prominently or enough”

Near the end of the report, Mr Painter goes further, linking climate change skepticism to “anti-science sentiments”. Note the figure of speech: ‘anti-science’ plus ‘sentiment’, in other words, skepticism as ‘twice irrational':

(p113) “The way in which climate skepticism feeds into, and is a manifestation of, wider anti-science sentiments both within a newspaper and wider society is just one area with needs further research”

As common in works of a much lower quality than “Poles Apart”, suggestions about some evil monstrosity lurking behind skepticism are not far from the surface. Look at the case of Nitin Sethi, a special correspondent for the Times of India. Try as he might, Mr Sethi admits he can’t find nefarious skeptic puppeteers, actually is convinced there is little coordination among skeptics, versus a giant organised pushing by “climate change ‘believers‘”. Never mind, that baseless initial fear of skeptics being funded by or affiliated to the devil or thereby, is deemed enough to shut off all “skeptical voices” (my emphasis):

(p83) [Nitin Sethi] says he has found about 8-10 articles in scientific journals carrying skeptical voices, but he has been ‘skeptical about picking them up. My first question has been to ask if I can find their sources of funding or affiliation’. Finally [he] says he is not aware of any coordinate lobbying attempts by skeptics in India. On the contrary, he says the voice of the climate change ‘believers’ is so strong that he is wary of civil society and the 500 local and internationally affiliated NGOs he says there are in India which are pushing the government to do more on climate change.

“Poles Apart” gives further credence to the ‘skeptics-as-evil-monsters’ idea by pointing readers (page 114, note 256) to Tom Yulsman’s Copenhagen-era “7 Tips for Covering Climate Change”, that includes the conspiratorial invitation to

“Understand and distinguish between legitimate analyses and what Eric Pooley calls ‘weapons of mass persuasion’”

For some reason, the “Poles Apart” authors don’t connect ‘mass persuasion‘ to Nithin Seti’s NGOs. Another example of skepticism as abomination is in the words of Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey, lamenting the concept as having been somehow stolen:

(p17) “skepticism is a major part of science. and it’s a shame it has been appropriated. […] If we could reclaim the word, that would be progress”

Finally, Mr Painter’s work for the report has been sponsored by the British Council. Sponsorship is seldom a problem, but it means having to work very hard before being able to claim “agnosticism” on any topic. The sponsor, in fact, is not agnostic at all, as per the British Council’s “Climate Change” web page:

“The evidence is clear: human activity is dramatically altering the environment of the very world we live in. Through deforestation and burning fossil fuels, our actions are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising the temperature of the land, sea and air. Climate change affects us all and it’s taking place on a global and local scale.”

“made up of a series of projects which focus on different parts of society, on differing communities, in order to provide an understanding of climate change throughout society, not just within the scientific and political communities”

“Climate change will remain an important part of the content of our core programmes in the arts, English, education and society around the world. Apart from climate change being a critical issue in its own right, it also captures the imagination of young people and stimulates international debate. Our work is part of the UK’s commitment to tackling climate change”

Just like it would be difficult to imagine the British Council sponsoring a report that would undermine all that climate change effort, it is therefore also difficult to believe “Poles Apart” to be “agnostic” about climate change “skepticism”. This appears clearly also in one of Mr Painter’s most important points, the understanding that there is more than one kind of climate change “skepticism”.

(p114) “This study has gone to some lengths to describe the full spectrum of climate skepticism. This is because we think, like many other commentators, that it is the role of good journalism to differentiate between the types of skepticism”

Andy Revkin, former environment correspondent at The New York Times and well-known climate blogger, praised “Poles Apart” on this point at the launch event. Notably, Mr Painter had figured out as much in the 2010 “Summoned by Science” report:

(p78) “there are serious and well-informed bloggers who are not driven by political ideologies or by money from the fossil fuel lobby. The blogosphere may be ‘impure’ compared to the peer-review process but it clearly demands openness and access to data that were absent in the preinternet days. And it is here to stay.”

Unfortunately, the importance of such a realisation does not reverberate throughout the “Poles Apart” report: readers are treated to repeated attempts at conflating all skeptics together, and ”skeptic” and “denier” remain frustratingly interchangeable. For example in Appendix 4 the list of “skeptics” does not contain any category, conflating US politician Joe Barton, scientist John Christy, UK politician Lord Nigel Lawson and TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh all ending up under a single, giant umbrella.

Another example concerns what is described in the report as the “methodology commonly applied” in academic studies of climate change in the media (p36), where four categories of newspaper articles are described as those that:

“present the viewpoint that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) accounts for all climate changes

give a ‘balanced account’ surrounding the existence and non-existence of AGW

present multiple viewpoints but emphasise the claim that the anthropogenic component contributes negligibly to changes in the climate”

According to Mr Painter though, “Category (4) is where skeptic, denialist, or contrarian views would be most represented.” This is in contradiction to “Poles Apart”’s definition of “skeptic” reported above.

The problem continues when “Poles Apart” turns to politics:

(p112) “The view that climate skepticism is mainly a feature of a certain narrow strand of conservative ideology (libertarian and strongly free-market) may also help to explain the situation in the USA […] This is also one factor explaining the absence of persistent climate-skeptic voices in the media in Brazil, France, and India”

However, during the launch event Mr Revkin did make the point that US TV networks are fairly “progressive” (his word) on the topic of climate change. On the other hand, this is not mirrored by a large “progressive” majority in the population. It is also not clear how many libertarians in social and economic matters would describe themselves as “conservative” (as if there were too much freedom to preserve). But again, how could any of that accommodate for all people with opinions ranging from “global temperatures are not warming” to “anthropogenic global warming is happening but urgent action by governments to counter AGW is not necessary”?

The report authors seem to be moving back and fro on who actually qualifies as “skeptic”. And so whilst the recognition of the variety of skeptical positions rises “Poles Apart” above many undignified, low-quality polemics against “climate change denialists”, it almost looks as if parts of report have been written by somebody unaware of the existence of that very same point. It’s a confusion that could have been easily avoided.

“This is a wide-ranging comparative study about the prevalence of climate skeptic voices in the print media in six countries: Brazil, China, France, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.”

That is the opening line of “Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate skepticism” a report written by a team of researchers headed by James Painter for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) and the British Council; and a great example of all that is strange with contemporary (climate-mainstream) journalism: a mix of the sublime and of the much-less-than-sublime, where great insights and surprisingly clear expositions have to coexist with stunning simplifications, abysmal naïvetés and incredibly one-sided analyses fed by an almost existential neglect of a large chunk of reality.

Hosted by the British Council in London on November 10, 2011 (live microblogging here), the launch event for “Poles Apart” saw Mr Painter accompanied by a panel composed by Rebecca Nadin, author of the China section of the report; Yves Sciama, French science/environment journalist and author; and (via internet videoconference) Andy Revkin, former environment journalist at the New York Times where he still manages the “Dot Earth” blog. The panel chair was John Lloyd, well-known journalist and Director of Journalism at the RISJ.

The effort behind “Poles Apart” has been truly remarkable, with an analysis of almost 5,000 newspaper articles, taken “in most countries” from “ an example of a left-leaning and a right-leaning newspaper”. This is because the authors:

“were also interested in exploring whether there was a correspondence between the prevalence of skeptical voices and the political leaning of a newspaper”

Results roughly followed along the same line, at least in some countries. According to the press release accompanying “Poles Apart”:

“the researchers discovered a link between the amount of coverage given to climate skeptics and the political viewpoint of newspaper titles in the UK and the US”

However

“this link did not appear in the other study countries – Brazil, France and India”

Mr Painter summarised in the press release the report conclusions about what is behind the differences:

“There are politicians in the UK and the US who espouse some variation of climate skepticism. Both countries also have organisations for ‘climate change skeptics’ that provide a skeptical voice for the media, particularly in those media outlets that are more receptive to this message. This is why we see more skeptical coverage in the Anglo-Saxon countries than we do in the other countries in the study where one or more of those factors appear to be absent”

Remarkably, “Poles Apart” recognizes there are several forms of climate skepticism. It even contains a varied definition of “skeptic”, as somebody holding one or more of the following views (see Appendix 2, item 8, page 121 in the report)

global temperatures are not warming

global temperatures are warming but a) the anthropogenic contribution (burning fossil fuels) to global warming or climate change is over-stated, negligible, or non-existent compared to other factors like natural variations or sun spots or b) it is not known with any or enough certainty what the main causes are

anthropogenic global warming is happening but a) it is not known with enough certainty what the impacts will be, due to inadequacies of climate modelling or other doubts; b) urgent action by governments and/or substantial government spending (on all or some aspects of mitigation or adaptation) to counter AGW is not necessary

However, for reasons that are never made clear, the six categories are often conflated throughout the report, and skepticism in one or more aspects of climate change is short-handed into a meaningless phrasing, “climate skepticism”. And rather strangely, “Poles apart” closes with a quote by “veteran British environmental journalist Geoffrey Lean”, somehow throwing in the air the whole idea of the relevance of a focus on “skeptical voices”:

“We should be debating not scientific certainty, but risk – or more precisely, what levels of risk we are prepared to take with the futures of our children and grandchildren”

That’s one of several instances where “Poles Apart” comes close to undermining its own raison d’être.

From People Like to be Fooled – interview by Peter Moon – translation by Michael Silva – just out in eSkeptic:

ÉPOCA: Why do people insist on believing that those allegations are true?

Shermer: Because mediums say they are true. All mediums, witchdoctors and saints have to say is that they have visions and can predict the future so that people will believe them. It’s part of human nature. We didn’t evolve to doubt or question. Developing a critical mind and having your own view of the world takes education, reflection and time. Having faith is much easier. People prefer to be deceived.

Comment of mine at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc about the Dec 2011 entry in the “45 Beacon: Letter from Headquarters” column of the “Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS)”, written by Keith Seitter, Executive Director of the AMS:

Judith – I don’t think you’ve read what he’s written. And I am not sure he read what you wrote either.

Mr Seitter is still entrenched in his CAGW bubble and can’t possibly understand much about the Uncertainty Monster.

First of all, he acknowledges to have “overly simplified the situation” by separating people in “convinced” and “unconvinced“, then towards the end of his piece he goes back addressing “the unconvinced crowd“.

He has also no clue about the possibility that, among the “convinced by the evidence that anthropogenic climate change [is] occurring“, there could be people unconvinced it’s anything to be afraid of, or not overall beneficial.

Third, It is illogical to state “Scientists generally welcome any avenue of research that is carried out with integrity and scientific rigor — especially when the results of that research challenge our thinking” just before writing “Many climate scientists will be angered by this paper“. The two sentences can’t be true in the same universe.

You should also take note of Mr Seitter’s militant (fundamentalist?) approach to the topic. He can drone on and on about wholly uncalled-for references to “a standard of scientific honest[y] that most of the[i]r blogs and opinion pieces simply cannot meet” and “unscientific noise that seeks to obscure real scientific results“. All one should read is of course “We have the Truth and everybody not perfectly adhering to our Truth is wrong and dishonest“.

In short, Mr Seitter has not understood what your paper was about, and still lives in-between the “monster hiding” and “monster exorcism” phases. And I wouldn’t trust him with an ice core extracted from a Coca-Cola deposit.

PS And are you [JC] sure that your paper should be considered just a “reminder that our desire to develop a self-consistent and coherent picture sometimes impedes our ability to work toward unraveling the full complexity of the climate system“? Does Mr Seitter understand climate?

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko [Трофи́м Дени́сович Лысе́нко; pictured left] (1898 – 1976) was an insignificant agriculturalist who thought he had a new way of developing crops that would vastly increase food production in the starving Russia of Stalin. It was called ‘vernalisation’, and it included treating seeds before cultivation to affect their behaviour.

Significantly, Lysenko introduced his ideas first through politics, in which he benefited from weighty support. Some argue that his precepts had a Marxist flavour, because they asserted that biology could be modified in the way that communists wanted to control people’s behaviour. The government was anxious to increase food production and to quell disturbances among the growers, while Lysenko was an adept propagandist. He became a cult leader who impressed the peasants.

Lysenko was the head of the Soviet Lenin All Union Institute of Agricultural Sciences, and he ran the nation’s research in this field. He promised to triple or to quadruple crop yields.

He demonised conventional genetics, which again suited his masters, who believed this to be the basis behind fascist eugenics.

No Opposition Tolerated

Opposition to Lysenko was not tolerated, and was labeled ‘bourgeois’ or ‘fascist’. Lysenko used his position to denounce Mendelian geneticists as “fly-lovers and people haters”, which had serious consequences. From 1934 to 1940, with Stalin’s blessing, numerous geneticists were shot, and others exiled to Siberia. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov [Николай Иванович Вавилов; pictured left] (1887 – 1943), for example, a truly great geneticist and biogeographer, was sent to Siberia, where he died of starvation in 1943, while Lysenko, in person, took over his role as Director of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Any survivor of the purge had to keep quiet. In 1948, genetics was officially labeled a ‘bourgeois pseudoscience’, and genetic research came to a halt. Krushchev also supported Lysenko, but, after his departure in 1964, the Academy of Sciences investigated the records, and a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public. The ban on genetics was finally lifted in 1965.

When Lysenko denounced Mendelian thought as reactionary and decadent, he also announced that his speech had the approval of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The parallel for the ‘Global Warming’ movement is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which works through national and international organisations. The IPCC claims its reports are written by 2500 scientists, but in reality they are drawn up by only about 35 people, and are effectively ‘controlled’ by an even smaller number.

Opposition to ‘Global Warming’ is often likened to ‘Holocaust Denial’. We are repeatedly told that there is no debate – hardly a scientific approach. The influence of the IPCC has spread, and it has become increasingly difficult to get research funding without being a ‘believer in Global Warming’.

A New Religion

Why would governments be persuaded to follow this idea before it was scientifically evaluated? One reason may be that there was a rising tide of what some have likened to a new religion – ‘Environmentalism’. Of course, no politician wants to be seen as ‘anti-environment’, or to lose the votes of the ‘Greens’. The ‘Greens’, for their part, are happy to follow the climate-change line because it gives them enormous political power. As a minor party or influence they hold the balance of power, and the major parties dare not offend them.

The propaganda machine of the IPCC is magnificent, with its greatest tool being the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth. This still has enormous impact, although the High Court in Britain did decide it could not be shown in schools without comment because it contained major errors. I suspect that this film was the reason that the Nobel Peace Prize was given to Al Gore and to the IPCC.

Another propaganda hit was the infamous ‘Hockey Stick Graph’, purporting to show that temperature was rising at an ever-increasing rate. This has been totally discredited, but it still seems to be branded on the collective mind of politicians and the public. Much Government propaganda has been lent to support ‘Global Warming’, and major media outlets, such as the BBC in Britain, have chosen to join in on the ‘Global Warming’ side.

No Siberia

Climate change, like Lysenkoism, is much easier to understand than the complexities of real science. This appeals to the public, and also to politicians and other influential people, who can talk as if they understand it. If questioned about details, they simply refer back to the IPCC reports.

So-called ‘independent reports’ on climate change have been produced by Nicholas Stern in Britain and Ross Garnaut in Australia. Both Stern and Garnaut make it plain that they are not scientists and have based their conclusions on the IPCC reports. Yet, both continue to make public statements warning about the increasing dangers of climate change. This merely keeps their reports in the public eye, and echoes the flawed science of IPCC ‘Global Warming’.

At a lower level, without the need for evidence, everything can be blamed on ‘Global Warming’ – droughts, floods, malaria, hurricanes, and even global cooling! The IPCC rhetoric continues, although their predictions have failed to come true, just as Lysenkoism continued when the promised crop-yield increases never arrived. The IPCC forecast ever-increasing temperatures, but average global temperatures have become lower since 1998. They have now put off ‘Global Warming’ for 15 years because some other factors have intervened. The models did not predict this, but such details do not affect ‘the faithful’.

Some scientists sided with ‘Global Warming’ in the early days, and are so committed that they cannot now get off the bandwagon. Others worked for the IPCC, but resigned when they realised how their work was being used, or that real science did not support the claims that were being made. Luckily, we do not have the equivalent of Siberia to deal with these scientists.

‘The Global Warming Affair’ has already lasted over twenty years, and many administrative and scientific research centres have sprung up – most of the latter involving computer simulators. Computer simulation has a part to play in science, but it should not replace observation, hypothesis-testing, and falsification. There are now ‘Departments of Climate Change’, for which read ‘Departments of Global Warming Blamed on Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide’.

A Lesson From History: Parallels With Lysenkoism

We should not forget a basic fact, namely that the one villain of the piece – and the one that is costing billions of dollars – is anthropogenic carbon dioxide. This is the equivalent of ‘vernalisation’ in the Lysenko era.

In summary, the comparisons between Lysenkoism and ‘Global Warming’ can be rehearsed as follows:

1. Work first through political organisations;

2. Claim that the science is settled. There is nothing to debate;

3. Disregard, or deny, all the accumulating evidence that the predictions might be wrong;

5. Victimise the opposition (execution and exile; loss of jobs or research funds, public and media humiliation);

6. Relate to a current ideology (Stalinism; Environmentalism);

7. Support a vast propaganda machine; and,

8. Create a huge bureaucracy where many people have careers dependent upon ‘the ruling concept’.

The parallel can be seen perfectly in a work by Helena Sheehan(1), who wrote of Lysenkoism:

“What went wrong was that the proper procedures for coming to terms with such complex issues were short-circuited by grasping for easy slogans and simplistic solutions and imposing them by administrative fiat.”

Lysenkoism was eventually replaced by real science. The same will happen to ‘Global Warming’, because real science will not go away. _____________

Andy – I’m very surprised by the phrasing of your FOI question. So what if there is “fishing” involved?

The important bit about FOI is that it applies no matter what the intentions of the requester are.

Otherwise every Government agency will always argue FOI exemption by claiming the requester is “fishing” for information. And especially so if the requester is a journalist (who is presumed to be looking for something to publish, therefore pretty much single-mindedly interested in “fishing”).

Intention-dependent FOI is not freedom, rather a gracious (and always temporary) concession on the part of the State. It’s like trying to define as democratic a Parliament you can vote for only if invited to the electoral polls.

Are you sure decades of struggle to get FOI in place should be considered as wasted just to defend publicly-funded scientists who can’t understand their rights and duties, and pretend FOI is a waste of time when in reality it’s a clerical activity?

ps I’ve been subject to FOI In the past and anything I write at work can potentially be used in a court of law

So you’ve finally realized there’s a set of simple innovations that could save the lives of millions right now, help the environment and perhaps even slow down global warming (see John Tierney’s “A renegade climate idea that could work“, IHT, Jan 18, 2012).

The fact that those actions have been neglected thus far because of lack of “glamour” and an obsession with cutting carbon dioxide emissions tells everything one needs to know about the inhumanity sadly intrinsic to many environmental activist organizations.

Humans are not vermin. Children dying as we speak because of black carbon filling their lungs in windowless huts are not trade-offs to sacrifice in a fight to convince the world to use fewer SUVs.

Prof Roger Pielke Jr’s “iron law of climate policy” says CO2 emission cuts policies always lose against economic growth pushes. Such a rule ought to be expanded : because we’re humans, and we should remember our humanity. Therefore policies that save human lives have to take precedence over attempts at defining global environment-related treaties. Always.

In its latest “Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX)”, whose “Summary for Policymakers” (1) is dated November 18, 2011, the IPCC writes (my emphasis):

(p9) “Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame”

Therefore people trying right now to discern/portray climate change of the extreme variety, (“disasters [that] produce widespread damage and cause severe alterations in the normal functioning of communities or societies“, according to the IPCC – in other words the only changes of actual practical interest), are placing themselves outside mainstream science, perhaps out of naivety, perhaps due to personal gain.

In any case, not one of the usual suspects will lament such a manipulation of the best evidence we have. Who needs skeptics when believers are so determined to sustain each other through long-distance charades?

Tallbloke has responded here and here. The end result has been that WUWT has apparently transmogrified into Climate Progress, after celebrating its 100M hit. Not sure how long I’ll hang around it, unless things change.

And the topic that has caused so much heating? If there is any gravitational explanation for the “greenhouse effect”. Cue millions of words written for nothing.

People tackle the problem of why bumblebees fly, some ideas are thrown around, those ideas are incomplete, so people come to the conclusion that since there is no solution to the problem, bumblebees don’t fly.

In the meanwhile, bumblebees fly. Back to square one.

In management circles, this is all pointed out as a fundamental error…the fact that you don’t have a solution doesn’t mean the problem is impossible to solve. It simply means you should concentrate on analysing the problem and in collecting more data, rather than immediately try to identify a solution.

For those harder in understanding, the observation is that independently from the composition of the atmosphere and the presence of a solid surface underneath it, every planetary atmosphere in the solar system has a “troposphere”, defined as the part where downward lapse rates are positive, i.e. temperatures increase as the distance from the top of the troposphere increase.

The same thing applies to any self-standing gas cloud anywhere in the universe. There is always a surface “below” which temperatures increase with pressure. Otherwise stars won’t ever ignite.

Now if this is because of whatever Hans has said, or N&Z, or it’s Tooth Fairies, that is not a question that will ever be answered in blogs (and especially, in their comment sections). But anybody stating that what the whole cosmos is alight by is “impossible”, they do have a problem telling truth from fantasy.

I recently surmised Peter Gleick be an astroturfer trained to make greens look less than…bright. This article would be compatible with that hypothesis, as the author shows no grasp of the history of climate, including what are known as Younger Dryas and the PETM.

It should also be obvious to all that the longer we look in the past, the lower our ability will be to discern one decade from another, and then one century from another. The climate might as well have changed dramatically every year a million years ago, still the paleo traces will only show some kind of long-term average of it.

We cannot seriously compare contemporary records with those of the past without considering that. It would be like saying more things happen now than in the Middle Ages just because more people write now than in the Middle Ages.

The continuous mentioning of the fabulously flawed 97% figure (it’s 97% of 77 out of 1,372) is just the cherry on the cake. Is Exxon funding the Pacific Institute?

Climategate 2.0 is helping filling some knowledge gaps, for example in the way the IPCC has been slowing killing itself, and several thousands humans to. The following concerns Regional Projections, and it’s a tragedy of communication.

Willingly or not, the IPCC has become a source of deadly confusion exactly because it has provided the information its audience wanted, even if it was scientifically unprepared to prepare that information.